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considerable, experience with student writers and her attempts
to work with them and their writing through practical
applications of Perry’s epistemological scheme. To Capossela,
because “the more advanced positions of Perry’s continuum are
parallel to the disposition and attitudes characteristic of
critical thinking” (55), the conclusions he had offered about
his research study at Harvard are crucial to an understanding,
for teachers of writing, of that titular “critical writing.”
According to Capossela’s reading of Perry’s cognitive theories,
“relativism” and “context and relationships” are inseparable,
existing within a dialectic and defined by a “reconstructive
collaboration.” Because of that “relativism,” she contends that
Perry’s scheme is “concerned with process as well as product,
with how a student proceeds as well as the outcome of the
enterprise” (55). She explains the consequence of Perry’s
emphasis upon “process”:
[I]n some ways critical thinking – and
cognitive maturity – are never achieved once
and for all. […] For Perry, intellectual
adulthood is marked by the ability to live with
uncertainty and lack of closure. Perhaps the
most challenging aspect of the Perry scheme is
that it is by definition open-ended:
commitment is meaningful only if it is
undertaken with an understanding that it may
have to be abandoned, adjusted, or transferred
at any moment. In addition, as one enters new
areas of inquiry, one can expect to travel the
earlier stages all over again. (55)
And because she claims that the “crucial nature of context lies
at the heart of relativism” (56) and that “the undeniable
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